The present invention generally relates to ways of monitoring health related disorders. More particularly, the invention provides a method and system for monitoring and controlling signals of sleep disorders acquired from a mammal user. Merely by way of example, the invention is applied using wide area electronic communication network and computer hardware. But it would be recognized that the invention has a much broader range of applicability such as applicability in an enterprise networks and others.
Many diseases afflict humans and other mammals. More than eighty such diseases comprise a class of ills known as sleep disorders. Some sleep disorders pose serious threats to health and well-being, and some are often treatable. Others are believed to be untreatable. As merely an example, sleep disorders are common. Many humans having a sleep disorder are often unaware of their affliction. For example, a single sleep disorder, obstructive sleep apnea, affects 5-15% of American adults and may be reasonably suspected in the 40% of adults who snore and the 5-10% of children who snore. Thus, obstructive sleep apnea is sufficiently common that, ideally, all primary care physicians should perform evaluations for it several times per day and should expect to diagnose it several times per week. Yet, fewer than 1% of patients in primary care carry the diagnosis of sleep apnea (E. M. BALL, et al. Diagnosis and treatment of sleep apnea within the community. The Walla Walla Project. Arch Intern Med. 1997;157(4):419-24.) (N. R. KRAMER, et al. The role of the primary care physician in recognizing obstructive sleep apnea. Arch Intern Med. 1999;159(9):965-8.) (N. C. NETZER, et al. Using the Berlin Questionnaire to identify patients at risk for the sleep apnea syndrome. Ann Intern Med. 1999;131(7):485-91.) (T. YOUNG, et al. Estimation of the clinically diagnosed proportion of sleep apnea syndrome in middle-aged men and women. Sleep. 1997;20(9):705-6.). A major limitation to reducing the public health burden of sleep disorders has been in diagnosing them.
Conventional techniques for diagnosing sleep disorders have limitations preventing them from becoming widely used. For example, if the patient's fundamental problem occurs during sleep, it often follows that observations should be made of the sleeping patient. Such observations are generally not practical in most physician offices. Specialized sleep-monitoring facilities allow assessments of a sleeping patient by collecting a plurality of physiological signals from the patient—a procedure known as “polysomnography.” Polysomnography performed in such facilities, however, is often inconvenient for the patients who sleep there overnight and has proven to be expensive as well.
To overcome the limitations of dedicated sleep-monitoring facilities, other conventional techniques may permit collection of physiological signals as the patient sleeps at his or her home. These techniques include a hardware device for recording physiological signals. After recording physiological signals during sleep, the recorded physiological signals are accessed and analyzed, and information related to the analysis is made available to an end-user. Conventional techniques have many limitations in this regard. Logistics surrounding the analysis facility and return of the recording device are a major issue.
In some techniques, a physician's office or other health care facility is an analysis facility. This typically means that the expertise needed to analyze the signals resides within the health care facility. Humans may be the repository of such expertise, but this is problematic because humans ideally need training to performing such analyses, and because human experts are generally expensive. Machines (including software codes running on general purpose computers) may also perform analyses in one or more health care facilities. Such an arrangement places significant burdens on the human caretaker of the machine(s) at each facility. For example, a caretaker should be aware of updates and recalls of the analysis software, and should install updates as they become available. In addition, the caretaker should ensure the computer is properly configured for the software and remains in a validated state, all of which may be challenging, given periodic updates to operating systems, possible corruption of necessary system files, interference from other software, and so on. Physical and usage security also should be maintained around the computer, to prevent accidental or malicious tampering. This is especially difficult for a shared, general-purpose computer. Although some conventional techniques use both humans and machines to perform analyses, such techniques often magnify problems associated with a system, which inherits problems of both humans and machines.
Other approaches attempt to centralize the analysis facility. As merely an example, a company called Sleep Solutions Inc. (herein “Sleep Solutions”) sends sleep-monitoring hardware to the patient's home by post or other delivery service. The hardware records physiological signals and is then returned, by post or other delivery service, to the Sleep Solutions analysis facility. The physiological data are analyzed, and the report is made available to the patient's physician over the Internet. There are several difficulties with this method. Postal services may be slow. Overnight delivery is possible with some delivery services, but at considerable expense. Furthermore, equipment may be damaged or lost in transit, which adds to expense and may necessitate a repeat study on the patient. This approach may also require considerable expense to support an infrastructure at the analysis facility to receive diagnostic hardware items, prepare them for the next use, and then distribute them. Still another limitation with the Sleep Solutions system arises in making patient reports available on the Internet. Any transmission of medical information must generally be done securely. Sleep Solutions employs the common combination of username and password at the end-user site. A limitation of this system is well known: many human computer-users have a tendency to choose an easily-guessed password and/or write their password somewhere it might be found.
Another product is offered by SNAP Laboratories, which also uses a centralized analysis facility. SNAP often uses a digital audio tape (DAT) recorder to capture the sounds made by a sleeping patient. The sounds are recorded onto a DAT cassette tape, and the cassette tape is sent by post or other delivery service to an analysis facility maintained by SNAP. This system has all the problems of the system of Sleep Solutions, and further adds costs of a consumable data storage item (the DAT cassette tape).
Other conventional approaches attempt to teach the transmission of physiological data to a remote analysis facility. These approaches, however, often cannot practically be implemented on a large scale, as they contain significant shortcomings, e.g. confidential patient information is open on the network, account information is inadequate, only a portion of information of potential diagnostic utility is transmitted, analysis methods are inflexibly implemented, provisions for technically unsophisticated users are not described, and so on. Depending upon the particular approach, there can also be many other limitations.
From the above, it is desirable to have improved techniques for monitoring health related disorders.